Hearing Quells Doubts About Prison Correction Officials And Consultants Persuade Lawmakers Best Deal Struck For Private Facility

Legislators concerned that the state didn’t get the best deal it could on its first private prison grilled prison officials and consultants Friday and got a blizzard of facts and figures to answer their questions.

Rep. Don Pischner, R-Coeur d’Alene, said after the special budget committee hearing that he was satisfied “the steps were followed.”

Pischner, who has worked in the asphalt field for years, said he has a lot of experience in the bidding process. “I know how it feels to be one of those seven people that didn’t win the bid,” he said.

After reviewing all the details Friday, he said he believed bidders all had the necessary knowledge about the process, and no one was treated differently than anyone else.

Bill Proctor, a consultant to the state Building Authority, told the committee, “In a world where you get what you pay for, the lowest-priced plans are not necessarily the best prison.”

Corrections Corp. of America won the bid to build a 1,250-bed prison south of Boise for $49 million and operate it for three years at $38.42 per inmate a day. The $100 million contract is the largest the state ever has awarded.

Correction Director Jim Spalding said the prison will be completed in September 1999 or the company will begin paying $25,000 a day until it is.

Wackenhut Corp., which came in second in the bidding even though its cost was lower, sent a letter to the committee’s co-chairmen asking that Idaho set its appeal period for complicated bids at two weeks rather than one, and that it conduct a separate bidding process if the private prison needs to be expanded down the road. Plans called for the prison to have future expansion space to bring it up to 3,000 beds.

Pischner said he thought those requests were reasonable.

Sen. Stan Hawkins, the Ucon Republican who failed to stop the project in court last month, said, “This process has failed the taxpayer.”

But Proctor pointed out that in Wackenhut’s case, the general contractor, Micron Construction Inc., never had built a prison and proposed what he called an aggressive construction schedule using poured-in-place concrete that is susceptible to weather delays.

By contrast, Corrections Corp. of America’s contractor, Morrison Knudsen Corp., has built a half-dozen major prisons and intends to use precast concrete construction.

Proctor, who has spent 27 years in the prison construction business, said the construction bid was influenced by the quality of material used and the designs. Some designs would have been very expensive for security and some proposed materials “we know don’t hold up well in a prison environment.”

Spalding reiterated his justification for the extra space, laying out the figures that show the system designed to hold about 2,700 inmates is holding nearly 3,400 and still has to use county jail cells and out-of-state space to house 700 more.

He said that despite the lull in population growth during the last half of 1997, the increase in the net inmate count appears to have resumed and the cells in the new prison could be filled within months of its opening.

“I have every reason to believe this contract is going to work out, and we’re in for a long-term relationship,” he told the panel.

, DataTimes